Home ›
Software ›
What's New › 1998
What's New?
Recent Changes to SCRC Data Capture and Analysis Software
(From July 1997 to April 1998)
G. R. Detillieux
Spinal Cord Research Centre,
The University of Manitoba,
Winnipeg, Canada R3E 0J9
Capture
- During the software port to QNX, a bug was introduced in cap's
file name incrementing feature,
which caused it to lose digits in some cases.
This has been fixed.
- The dsepr program had problems with data misalignment when
reading from a pipe, due to it getting shorter blocks of data
than expected.
This has been fixed.
- The software now allows run names greater than ten characters on
QNX systems.
The previous limit was set for Masscomp systems, but most modern
filesystems allow larger file names now.
Analysis
- Fixed a memory allocation problem in the QNX version, which
sometimes caused the program to mistakenly report that it was out
of memory.
- The "W.F. activity start & stop time analysis" now picks better
names for the axes by default, using the waveform names.
- Changed the cycle normalisation technique to normalise active and
inactive phases independently.
This is controlled by a new "Percent of cycle active" parameter
(Set/Cycles/Percent-active),
and applies to cycle based trace or waveform averages, or graphs
using normalised cycles.
- Several new Set/Range options were added. Set/Range/Relative
presents a new menu, where if one of the Start or End times is
changed, the other follows along to preserve the same range
length.
This menu has "Half" and "Double" selections, to zoom in and out
the current analysis range, keeping to the centre of the range.
The Length can also be set from this menu.
The "Visually"
selection here lets you set the start time (keeping length the
same) or set the length, and fine adjustments can be made using
the "<" and ">" keys.
New "All" and "Undo" selections, under both Set/Range and
Set/Range/Relative allow you to quickly set the range to the
whole run, or revert to the range used during the next to last
"Go".
- The arrow keys have been redefined in analysis, to quickly change
the analysis range and redisplay.
The left and right arrows pan the display left or right through
the data, and are equivalent to Set/Range/Prev. then Go, and
Set/Range/Next then Go, respectively.
The up and down arrows zoom in and out, equivalent to the new
Half and Double operations.
- The new Analysis/Undo selection reverts to the analysis type used
during the next to last "Go".
- New parameters "Phase selection delay" and "Phase selection window"
(Set/Cycles/In-phase/Delay and Window),
control the assignment of triggered sweeps to specific phases of
a cycle.
The range of points they indicate must fall entirely in a given
cycle phase, or bin within a cycle, for the sweep to be used.
- Handling of deleted sections is a little more rigorous and
consistent, and makes use of the phase selection delay and window
for any analysis involving triggered sweeps (traces or waveform
segments in a waveform average).
For spike interval or frequency graphs, an interval is excluded if
any section within this interval is deleted.
- The Maint/Filter operation now updates the new waveform name to
indicate the cutoff frequency, and whether the result is above
(high-pass) or below it.
- The Raw waveform display handles better the case where there are
too many waveforms to plot in a small display window.
This used to lead to erratic plotting or internal errors.
It also now indicates where sections are deleted.
- The Raw waveform display now has an "Absolute time scale" option
(Set/W.F.-disp/Abs.-time),
which causes the X-axis scale bar to show the time range used
within the run, rather than always starting the scale bar at 0 to
indicate time relative to the start of the analysis range.
- The time range used in an analysis is now shown on the top line,
right after the run name, in a more abbreviated form.
It used to get bumped off the display by a long run description
line.
For any analysis using frames, the frame range is also shown on
the display.
- Trace averaging based on tag value and all W.F. spike vs W.F. level
graphs now support the "Active cycle phase only" option.
Trace averaging based on tag value now correctly handles repetitions
in the "Tag list".
Qm
- Four new predefined macros have been added to the macro library
for the Run/Calc operation.
They are area, starea, totarea and absarea.
Miscellaneous
- Fixed a byte-ordering problem which caused "salvagerun" to
calculate the run length incorrectly on QNX and Linux systems.
- A new program, "rmendfrm", physically deletes the last frame in a
.frm
file.
This can be used to clean up after axon2run, if the Axon data
file had an undesired extra episode in it, with the wrong trigger
time, as can happen at times.
- The software has been ported to Red Hat Linux 5.0 with the GNU C library.
- A new program, "asc2run", converts data exported in ASCII format
from genesis or other programs, to the run file format used by
this software.
- The usage message from the "genplot" program now shows all
options available.
Directory of What's New Listings
SCRC WWW administrator:
www@scrc.umanitoba.ca
Copyright © G. R. Detillieux, Spinal Cord Research Centre, The University of Manitoba.